Tuesday, February 05, 2013

It's Not That I Disagree With The Thesis...

This would be getting a lot more attention if the president had an (R) after his name instead of that (D), which must be the chemical formula for teflon since it allows anything bad to be deflected by its wearer:

The Department of Justice has developed a white paper outlining the specific circumstances under which the United States can conduct a lethal drone strike against an American citizen, a copy of which was obtained Monday by NBC News.

The paper provides the first detailed look at the criteria the Obama administration uses to judge if it can legally kill American citizens traveling abroad without the benefit of due process. The release of the administration's legal rationale comes days before CIA nominee John Brennan is scheduled to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Panel members, including Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), have been pressing the administration on the issue for more than a year.

I don't fault the president for this, although it is hard to jibe with his pre-election stances. But I do call out the so-called anti-war left who, if the president had an (R) after his name, would be out protesting in the streets by the tens of thousands. I'd seriously have more respect for them if they were honest about their intentions.

Update, 2/6/13: Instapundit encapsulates:

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Drone Strikes, Waterboarding, and Moral Preening. “So what do you think Senator Barack Obama would have said if President George W. Bush had pursued these policies? And how do you think the press and the political class would have reacted?”

The same month, former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith - who provided the legal authorization for the illegal Bush NSA warrantless eavesdropping program - went to the New Republic to celebrate that Obama was not only continuing the core Bush/Cheney approach to terrorism, but even better (from his perspective), was strengthening those policies far beyond what Bush could achieve by transforming Democrats from opponents of those policies into supporters.

And exactly as Goldsmith happily predicted, polls now show that Democrats and even self-identified progressives support policies that they once pretended to loathe now that it is Obama rather than Bush embracing them.

3 comments:

This just in ... politicians say things that they then either hedge or openly go back on. Bush, no new taxes? clinton, I did not have sex with tha woman? It's nothing new, save that this one violates the Constitution. I don't think there's been anyone killed yet who didn't deserve killing, but that doesn't mean there couldn't be. I get the enemy combatant argument ... but unless you're officially at war,it's treason...and you should still get due process.

"You don't get due process when you're getting shot on the modern battlefield, this is just an extension of that."

The "limit" problem to this is that:

(a) I find it unlikely that this war will ever be declared as over. There won't be enough congress-critters who will want to risk claiming that it is over and then seeing another Twin Towers type disaster. So the US is effectively in a state of war forever. And,

(b) Because of the nature of the war, the modern battlefield is pretty much everywhere.

I don't see what is to prevent some US president in the future from claiming the right to do pretty much whatever he wants based on (a) and (b). It will have to happen gradually, but the indefinite detention of US citizens under the NDAA law seems like a nice start (granted, the courts have blocked it for now).

Twenty years ago, passing this sort of thing as a law wouldn't have even come up as an option. Now we have this as a bill that congress has passed and the president has signed. Eventually, we'll have a court that allows it.

Wash-rinse-repeat :-(

I'd like to say that I see a logical limit to this, but I really don't.